I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Microsoft’s Zune is FAIL.

In the wee hours of this morning, all of the 30gb model Zune music players hit a system glitch. A power cycle will not clear it. There are some reports that opening the unit and pulling the battery cables off the connector will clear the situation, but a lot of users won’t be comfortable with that.
This comes after the lowering of the price of the Zunes, and immediately after Apple stated that in 2009, the prices for macbooks and ipods will be dropping.
Not exactly good timing for this kind of news.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t carry an ipod, either. I’ve been using mp3 players for much, much longer than there has been an “ipod” at all, when all mp3 players were referred to as, well, “mp3 players”. I have been getting some really excellent mileage out of the small, flash memory-based ones that can now be bought for very little scratch, and for that reason, you aren’t afraid of a system fail (if it ever did happen), and you aren’t terribly worried about it if you happen to leave it in sight somewhere, and you don’t really mind wearing it when doing housework, yardwork, or even working out.

These days, they all seem to have a lot of the same features: an FM tuner, alarm clock album cycling, true random play, FM recording via schedule, etc. It really comes down to the interface on the device and the capacity, and if you follow it at all, you know that memory costs next to nothing now. The last round of flash-based mp3 players I got (maybe eight months ago) all have microSD slots, which allow for massive expansion, and allow you to swap out your stock of tunes and podcasts on the run.

To everyone with a 30GB Zune: Your music player has passed its “freshness date” Return it to the manufacturer and ask for an upgrade.

I’ve been getting back in touch with a bunch of long-lost people lately on Facebook, which is the time that Social Media is at its very best.

I’ve been running into some issues lately with several apps (not just this one) where some of the basic functionality just does not work with Opera.

I’ve been using the Opera browser as my primary for about six or eight months, and it’s like riding a rocket, but things like that are ridiculous. Opera is more standards-compliant than any other browser, and you run into things like this. First guesses would be shoddy programming by apps developers, but I’m also starting to wonder if maybe it’s something in the FB API, since there is a standard display message about it.
It might have to do with the widget framework that they were harrowing to developers. It might be worth writing an FB app just to try to hit the Opera barrier.

Have any suggestions for an FB app? Leave ‘em in the comments!

1. Vote
2. See results of polls
3. Upgrade Opera on all machines to 9.62 (security patch for History and Links areas)
4. Catch up on podcasts while waiting in line to vote
5. Make space on DVR for new Dr Who series to start
6. Recycle two more donated desktops to ‘net kiosks

Of course, this is all after the dawn-to-dusk work schedule and homework, bath and bedtime, as well as the sitting in the car.
Is everyone ready to make US History happen? Let’s rock!

What does *your* list look like today?

The IT shortage is going to hit very hard.

Once we’ve farmed everything out and can’t seem to get it back together, and use local talent, once nobody goes into the fields of study required, what’s going to happen?

I’m starting to see a lot of IT workers getting really burned out and leaving the field. These are guys(and women) who studied computer science, worked through the trenches of field technician hell, suffered the slings and arrows of first tier support, rode the wave of the dot-com boom, and crawled through the muck of the aftermath of the bust.

We worked at so many places, getting servers to do interesting things, take over tons of manual work, solved interesting problems, developed and implemented “best practices”…

Talking with a lot of cohorts lately, I keep hearing the refrain of the same song, one that says that it’s not understood by business even after all the educating, it’s thankless, the hours and demands are endless, you are always on-call, always coming to the rescue, the money never gets better, there’s never enough help, and there isn’t much of a career path anymore.

I’m seriously hoping that these are not steady trends. I’ve seen all of this in working in many places, but it’s scary to think that it’s so widespread.

I ran into some bnking issues lately. The bank issued a new bank card to me, and I put it aside, waiting for the randomly-generated PIN to arrive. Another week rolled by, and one day, my old card just stopped working entirely. I’m sure that it was a scheduled event in order to secure the account. Of course, this happens when I’m on fumes, trying to fuel up and get to work on time.

Security is always good, and there are tons of new standards being rolled out to increase the security of our data these days. If you are in IT, healthcare, banking, etc., you are aware of the endless acronyms and how much of a headache people are having converting over, and training everyone to comply. Some of these headaches make it easy to dismiss the projects entirely, but these changes are so necessary in our current day.

Speaking of ATM cards, this video is pretty nuts…

http://view.break.com/534959
“This trip is gonna be great, Betsy! Let’s just stop by the ATM for some cash and then hit the road…”

Sometimes the security measures put into place can seem overbearing and draconian, but don’t you feel more secure?

Your nature walk is now “secure”.

It’s interesting to see your own attitudes toward a given historical event change over time. A couple of days ago (Saturday, even) was Patriots’ day. This one has nothing to do with Amercan football, and the majority of Americans on the street wouldn’t be able to tell you offhand what Patriot’s Day is supposed to be about. It’s likely because there isn’t a tradition of buying copious amounts of sugar, or killing a bird to use as a centerpeice.

The high points of the Revolutionary War, including the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s Ride are very familar, mostly due to Longfellow’s poem, but the holiday isn’t.

More info on Paul Revere’s ride
Timeline from PBS

The PBS site makes me wish I’d heard about the film before it aired. I bet it was good.

Just a little blast from the past here. Some of you were around back in the Hayes Volksmodem and BBS days, and will remember this as well as I do.

FYI – a “wahka” is the decidedly “proper” (by popular vote) name for
the characters “>” and “< ". This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of
Denver who still refer to them as "Norkies". The Michigan crowd
apparently has corrupted the spelling to "waka".

To wit, it is -
------------------------------------------------------------
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
perhaps---we're really not sure what the poem actually is
about. Here it goes:"

<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

original Leitner page
Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

I have been thinking back on this recently and was thinking that some new possibilities are possible nowadays with widespread PC usage, the internet, and all of our new web lingo. I’ll be posting a couple of attempts soon. If any of you want to take a whack, feel free to share.

After I heard about the recall on Aunt Jemima brand pancake mixes, I saw a really interesting background article at Obscure History.

I always thought of Aunt Jemima to be a silly product name, and a hearkening to old-fashioned days when the shadows of slavery and repression were still fluttering along the walls.

I know that some of you who drop by here on occasion don’t necessarily get the underpinnings of the Southern American dialect except where it is displayed on silver screens, so the reason the name seems silly to me might need an introduction.

In the plantation part of the south, Aunt Jemima would sound like “Ain’t Je Mama” — “Not your momma”. During the times of slavery and during the period where integration had not taken a foothold, the vision of a black houseworker named Aunt Jemima would bring up the idea of a slave who did all the housework and child rearing, but whom the children were constantly reminded that she isn’t “mother”.

I wasn’t aware of a huge chunk of the company’s background before they were bought by Quaker Foods, another brand known for an extreme close-up of a character who is meant to bring up feelings associated with the American past. This makes me wonder if they will be making an offer in the years coming for Wendy’s or maybe even the Sunbeam bread company or maybe even Martha Stewart.